How Can Teachers Tell if Something is AI-Generated?

What Does Academic Writing’s AI Detection Mean?

Academic writing’s AI detection means checking each point of content to know whether it’s human or AI generated. When teachers are checking AI in a piece of content, they use AI detection tools and also check some other patterns in the assignment. Educators may

• Use an AI detector

• Do a content comparison

• Check generic arguments

These are just some of the steps of AI checking, not the end. You can check AI content in various ways. Educators see the assignment or the text of students from different perspectives. They don’t solely see the AI score or a few things in the assignment to mark these as AI generated or human.

What Steps Do Educators Follow for AI Content Detection?

As described earlier, teachers use different ways to check AI in content. After checking the content in these ways, they can tell whether the content is AI generated or human.

Using an AI Detector

AI detection is the first step of checking AI in content. This step helps them identify generic or robotic sounding sentences in the content. Now the question is which tool is trustworthy as there are different AI detectors available on the web.

We asked various teachers to find the answer. The tool that most of the educators use for content detection is the Stealth Writer’s AI detector. Here’s the front picture of the tool:

To understand how teachers can determine if the content is AI generated, we tested it with different articles. We generated content through different AI writing tools and pasted that content into this AI Text detector.

The AI content detector by Stealth Writer.io highlighted the robotic sounding words which helped us know if AI percentage of the content. The topic was about “The Role of Education in Personal and Social Development”:

Afterwards, we used a writing tool to write content and made some changes to it to determine whether it could detect such texts or not.

Although the above text contains proper references, examples and percentages, this tool can still detect the content.

We wrote another piece of content on our own to determine whether it still gets a high AI percentage. We didn’t use any AI writing tool to write this content.

We solely took help from online articles and research. The result was significantly different. The topic was “The Importance of Inclusive Education,” and the results are given below:

As you can see in the above image, the AI detection score is much lower than the previous one. This helps teachers know if the student actually does proper searches for the content or just uses artificial intelligence to write content.

Writing Style and Sentence Structure

Every student has a different writing style and uses various sentence structures. When this starts to look more polished but, upon reading, feels empty and lacks critical thinking and personal insight, teachers start doubting it.

A teacher pays attention to an article or marks it as AI if they see:

• Long sentences in the content that read as unusual

• Tone shifts drastically like two people wrote the content.

• Inconsistent vocabulary that doesn’t match usual human writing

Although you can say that a human can write in such a way as well, humans follow a pattern while AI can’t.

Writing Process and History

You can’t say that a student doesn’t improve. They do improve while studying. But it doesn’t happen overnight. This takes time and the student improves everything gradually.

When teachers see an instant change in writing style and sentence structure, they mark it as AI written.

Moreover, students follow a specific process of writing. The headings and texts students use in their writing are different from how AI uses them in writing. As teachers don’t just check the content of an individual student, they know what type of headings are appropriate for the content.

When they don’t find those headings and texts and see a different one, then they mark the content as AI generated.

Analyzing Mistakes

When teachers are checking content, they know the mistakes that students usually make. When they see that the content is overly polished. Such content would automatically become suspicious.

So they analyze such articles thoroughly. As already explained earlier, teachers don’t just check the assignment of an individual student. They check the assignments of different classes so they know what mistakes are obvious.

Checking Tool History

If the students are submitting assignments in Google Docs (as a link), then teachers can see the history of Google Docs as well. When the content is copied from an AI writing tool and just pasted into the document (which is visible in the timeline), then this is obviously AI.

When someone writes content it becomes visible in the history. Teachers can see a time history of that content. If they see that the time is not varying, then it becomes obvious that the content is not written by a human.

What is Apparent in an AI Written Assignment?

AI generated content may seem smooth and impressive at first but there are certain things that human written content contains. When an AI writes the content, it may

• Contain sources or references that don’t exist.

• Arguments may read confident but they would be shallow.

• There wouldn’t be any personal insight in that writing

When humans write content, they provide relevant examples and evidence. Such evidence helps teachers understand that the student did proper research and after researching properly, they work on their assignment.

Moreover, human written content also contains personal insights or a point of view. When a teacher can’t find any personal insight or point of view, they identify such content as AI.

AI tools hallucinate a lot so there would be certain examples or situations that don’t happen but AI writes them. A teacher who has been teaching that subject knows what or how something happens, so if something is written incorrectly, they would definitely know who wrote that.

Conclusion

Although it is difficult to tell whether a certain assignment is actually written by a human or AI, there are certain patterns that AI content has. When a human writes content, it reads differently than an AI written content.

When the teacher follows all the above-mentioned points. It helps them know if the student wrote the assignment on their own or if an AI wrote it.

So, if you are a teacher, follow all these steps to check for AI in content. If you are a student, then do proper research before writing and add personal insight so your content reads as genuine and original.